all afternoon wasn’t an option.
“The disgrace was mine,” the earl said, looking his son straight in the eye. “I know full well you did not attempt to burn your brother with that iron.”
Ethan took a delicate sip of his tea. “Were you merely being petty and tyrannical then, when you turned the little thugs and perverts of Stoneham loose on me?”
“Perverts.” The earl tasted the word, found it foul. “Interesting choice. I’d discovered you asleep in Nicholas’s bed just the night before, and not for the first time.”
“Of course I was in his bed,” Ethan scoffed, “or he was in mine. How else were we to stay up half the night whispering without waking the younger boys?”
Ethan’s anger swam much, much closer to the surface, so close the earl perceived that the frigid cool in Ethan’s eyes was not impatience, annoyance, nor anything else half so tame.
A betrayed boy yet lurked in the man who’d come to call. A devastated, betrayed boy.
“I comprehend now, Ethan, that you and Nick remained innocent of the most lamentable adolescent behaviors. It took some time, Della’s incessant carping, and raising several more boys before I understood my mistake. By then, you were no longer speaking to any of us, save Della, and things turned out for the best.”
Ethan took another measured sip of his tea, then another, clearly trying to absorb the explanation the earl offered, but no doubt stumbling over the emotional enormity of the wrong done him, and not for the first time.
“In what manner,” Ethan spoke very softly, “do you consider things turned out for the best?”
“The two of you were entangled. You protected Nick. He protected you.”
“Is that not what brothers do?” Ethan asked with chilly civility.
“Not when one will take a seat in the Lords and the other is merely an earl’s by-blow. Sooner or later, you and Nicholas were going to have to face facts. I did neither of you any service by letting you get so close in the first place.”
The earl reassured himself of this version of the facts regularly. Things had worked out for the best—or they would soon.
“So having made that mistake,” Ethan said, but not quite dispassionately, “your only recourse was to compound it by separating us the way you did, bellowing accusations, and setting us against each other?”
The earl let his teacup clatter unsteadily onto its saucer. “I’ve said I was wrong, both in what I did and how I did it. I am not a perfect man, as you well know. But admit to me, please, that both you and Nicholas thrive, and despite my errors, you are both people to be reckoned with, capable of standing on your own two feet.”
Ethan rose to those two feet with an ease the earl tried not to envy. “You think old age alone has impaired your hearing and vision,
He departed in a few brisk strides, closing the door with enviable decorum.
Valentine took a seat at Nick’s Broadwood and folded down the music rack, then petted the instrument as if it were an obedient mistress. “So tell me what you seek in a wife, Nicholas. The hunt doesn’t seem to be progressing, and the Season doesn’t last forever.”
There was no heat in Nick’s reply. He’d never go a round of fisticuffs with a friend whose hands were so very talented. Instead he went to the sideboard and poured them each a brandy. “Any woman who marries me has to understand it will be a marriage for the sake of appearances only, and leave me in peace for the rest of my days.”
Val’s opening flourishes at the keyboard came to an abrupt pause. “In God’s name, why?”
“Why what?” Nick set Val’s drink on the piano’s lamp stand.
“Shame on you.” Val moved the drink to a little music table. “Why wouldn’t you, of all the randy creatures on God’s earth, marry a woman to take to your bed?”
Nick lowered himself to the sofa and regarded the drink he really did not want. “Firstly, I don’t need to marry to find women by the pairs and trios in my bed. Secondly, I do not intend to have children with my wife, because my size makes me poor breeding stock. Thirdly, I will not take advantage of some sweet young thing by taking her to my bed, then tossing her over while I go look for livelier game elsewhere, thus precipitating endless painful and avoidable scenes involving many damp handkerchiefs, broken vases, and hurt feelings.”
“You are full of tripe,” Val said calmly. When he resumed playing, the clever bastard chose a lullaby. Sweet, lyrical, and perfectly suited to cadging confidences from unsuspecting friends. “First, you adore women and invariably make them happy, at least bed-wise. There are
The little song lilted along, while Nick considered firing a pillow at Valentine’s head.
“I am posturing to court the semblance of a real wife.” Nick stretched out on the long sofa, his drink resting on his chest. “The fiction must be credible, at least until one of my brothers can go about the business in earnest.”
“You are serious about this,” Val said, frowning at Nick over the lid of the piano.
Nick waved a hand. “I killed my mother, you know.”
Val didn’t dignify that with a rejoinder, and the music grew even softer. “If you were going to marry in earnest, what sort of wife would you seek?”
Nick didn’t answer. He kept his eyes closed, let his breathing slow and deepen, let the music wash through the melancholy Val’s choice of topic left in his chest. What sort of wife would Nick choose, if he had any sort of meaningful choice?
A woman who could love him, of course. A woman who didn’t care he’d be an earl, who didn’t care he was too damned big to fit even in a ballroom, who didn’t care that the one thing he must never do was attempt to secure the Bellefonte succession.
“Leah danced the supper waltz with Reston again,” Darius said as he appropriated a drink from his brother’s decanter.
“And that’s good?” Trenton Lindsey, Viscount Amherst, watched his younger brother pour, thinking Darius’s eyes held a hint of something desperate.
“It’s good. She seems to like him, and he’s not Hellerington. The talk about Reston seems harmless enough —he enjoys the ladies of a certain reputation, but nothing more condemnatory than that. Have you seen Reston?” Darius tossed the drink back and punctuated the question with a glower.
“I doubt it. I do not circulate, to speak of, unless I’m escorting Leah. You know that.”
“He’s big,” Darius said. “Enormously tall with the muscles of a stevedore.”
A hazy impression tried to coalesce from the swampier regions of Trent’s memory. “Blond? Like Wotan or Thor in evening dress?”
Darius eyed the sideboard, his expression shifting to include a touch of consternation. “Berserker of the Bedroom is one of his nicknames. Biggest damned peer of the realm I’ve ever seen.”
Trent ran a finger over the sideboard and found a smudge of dust accumulated on his fingertip—a metaphor for his memory, perhaps. “I have met him, at Tatt’s. Reston seemed genial enough.”
“Always. He pulled me aside tonight and warned me very pleasantly that one of my female associates tried to threaten him when he’d parted from her.”
“She is no lady at all,” Darius said on a sigh. “Why do you think I found her of any interest? Reston backed
